An overview of China's OEM buying power, the impact of Greater China, changes in government incentives and growth forecasts. Explore the report

China's impact on the semiconductor industry: 2014 update

A decade of unprecedented growth

In 2004 when we published our first report on China’s impact on the semiconductor industry, we were responding to our clients’ concerns that China’s growing semiconductor production would cause over-capacity in the global market. Today, a decade later, it is not China’s semiconductor production that’s the story, but rather its semiconductor consumption. In fact, in 2013, China’s semiconductor consumption market grew by 10.1% (more than double the worldwide market growth of 4.8%) to reach a new record of 55.6% of the global market. Ongoing global demand for smartphones and tablets—the lion’s share of which are produced in China—is the main reason for this continued strong growth in semiconductor consumption and will continue to be a factor in the coming years.

Now a mature, global leader, we recognize that an annual in-depth look at the Chinese semiconductor market may not be as necessary or even as useful as it was ten years ago, and so this will be our final report in this format. Going forward, we will look at more targeted, specific issues and elements based on developments in the industry.

For this year’s update we have elected to release our report in three sections in order to provide the information to you as early in the year as possible. Our regular readers should note that all of the considerations described in the 2012 Update appendix, “Interpreting Chinese semiconductor statistics” and the “About this report” section remain relevant to this update and should be referred to as needed. Both sections are available on the links to the right.